FW: <nettime> Remix and Remixability

[guibertc]

For example : what do you think of Lev Manovich ? That is more of the
question in pertinence or not of digital avant-gardist theory and practice
than of Guégan about literary
 
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Quote (for the readibility)


Lev Manovich


Remix and Remixability


The dramatic increase in quantity of information greatly speeded up by
Internet has been
accompanied by another fundamental development. Imagine water running down a
mountain. If
the quantity of water keeps continuously increasing, it will find numerous
new paths and
these paths will keep getting wider. Something similar is happening as the
amount of
information keeps growing - except these paths are also all connected to
each other and
they go in all directions; up, down, sideways. Here are some of these new
paths which
facilitate movement of information between people, listed in no particular
order: SMS,
forward and redirect function in email clients, mailing lists, Web links,
RSS, blogs,
social bookmarking, tagging, publishing (as in publishing one=B9s playlist
on a web
site), peer-to-peer networks, Web services, Firewire, Bluetooth. These paths
stimulate
people to draw information from all kinds of sources into their own space,
remix and make
it available to others, as well as to collaborate or at least play on a
common
information platform (Wikipedia, Flickr). Barb Dybwad introduces a nice term
"collaborative remixability=B9" to talk about this process: "I think the
most
interesting aspects of Web 2.0 are new tools that explore the continuum
between the
personal and the social, and tools that are endowed with a certain
flexibility and
modularity which enables collaborative remixability =8B a transformative
process in which
the information and media we=B9ve organized and shared can be recombined and
built on to
create new forms, concepts, ideas, mashups and services." [1]

If a traditional twentieth century model of cultural communication described
movement of
information in one direction from a source to a receiver, now the reception
point is just
a temporary station on information=B9s path. If we compare information or
media object
with a train, then each receiver can be compared to a train station.
Information arrives,
gets remixed with other information, and then the new package travels to
other
destination where the process is repeated.

We can find precedents for this "remixability" -- for instance in modern
electronic
music where remix has become the key method since the 1980s. More generally,
most human
cultures developed by borrowing and reworking forms and styles from other
cultures; the
resulting "remixes" were to be incorporated into other cultures. Ancient
Rome remixed
Ancient Greece; Renaissance remixed antiquity; nineteenth century European
architecture
remixed many historical periods including the Renaissance; and today graphic
and
fashion designers remix together numerous historical and local cultural
forms, from
Japanese Manga to traditional Indian clothing. At first glance it may seem
that this
traditional cultural remixability is quite different from "vernacular"
remixability
made possible by the computer-based techniques described above. Clearly, a
professional
designer working on a poster or a professional musician working on a new mix
is different
from somebody who is writing a blog entry or publishing her bookmarks.

But this is a wrong view. The two kinds of remixability are part of the same
continuum.
For the designer and musician (to continue with the sample example) are
equally affected
by the same computer technologies. Design software and music composition
software make
the technical operation of remixing very easy; the Internet greatly
increases the ease of
locating and reusing material from other periods, artists, designers, and so
on. Even
more importantly, since every company and freelance professionals in all
cultural fields,
from motion graphics to architecture to fine art, publish documentation of
their projects
on their Web sites, everybody can keep up with what everybody else is doing.
Therefore,
although the speed with which a new original architectural solution starts
showing up in
projects of other architects and architectural students is much slower than
the speed
with which an interesting blog entry gets referenced in other blogs, the
difference is
quantitative than qualitative. Similarly, when H&M or Gap can "reverse
engineer" the
latest fashion collection by a high-end design label in only a few weeks,
this is part of
the same new logic of speeded up cultural remixability enabled by computers.
In short, a
person simply copying parts of a message into the new email she is writing,
and the
largest media and consumer company recycling designs of other companies are
doing the
same thing -- they practice remixability.

The remixability does not require modularity - but it greatly benefits from
it. Although
precedents of remixing in music can be found earlier, it was the
introduction of
multi-track mixers that made remixing a standard practice. With each element
of a song
-- vocals, drums, etc. -- available for separate manipulation, it became
possible to
=8Cre-mix=B9 the song: change the volume of some tracks or substitute new
tracks for the
old ounces. According to the book DJ Culture by Ulf Poscardt, first disco
remixes were
made in 1972 by DJ Tom Moulton. As Poscard points out, they "Moulton sought
above all a
different weighting of the various soundtracks, and worked the rhythmic
elements of the
disco songs even more clearly and powerfully=8AMoulton used the various
elements of the
sixteen or twenty-four track master tapes and remixed them."[2]

In most cultural fields today we have a clear-cut separation between
libraries of
elements designed to be sampled -- stock photos, graphic backgrounds, music,
software
libraries -- and the cultural objects that incorporate these elements. For
instance, a
graphic design may use photographs that the designer bought from a photo
stock house. But
this fact is not advertised; similarly, the fact that this design (if it is
successful)
will be inevitably copied and sampled by other designers is not openly
acknowledged by
the design field. The only fields where sampling and remixing are done
openly are music
and computer programming, where developers rely on software libraries in
writing new
software.

Will the separation between libraries of samples and "authentic" cultural
works blur
in the future? Will the future cultural forms be deliberately made from
discrete samples
designed to be copied and incorporated into other projects? It is
interesting to
imagine a cultural ecology where all kinds of cultural objects regardless of
the medium
or material are made from Lego-like building blocks. The blocks come with
complete
information necessary to easily copy and paste them in a new object --
either by a human
or machine. A block knows how to couple with other blocks -- and it even can
modify
itself to enable such coupling. The block can also tell the designer and the
user about
its cultural history -- the sequence of historical borrowings which led to
the present
form. And if original Lego (or a typical twentieth century housing project)
contains
only a few kinds of blocks that make all objects one can design with Lego
rather similar
in appearance, computers can keep track of unlimited number of different
blocks. At
least, they can already keep track of all the possible samples we can pick
from all
cultural objects available today.

The standard twentieth century notion of cultural modularity involved
artists, designers
or architects making finished works from the small vocabulary of elemental
shapes, or
other modules. The scenario I am entertaining proposes a very different kind
of
modularity that may appear like a contradiction in terms.  It is modularity
without a
priori defined vocabulary.  In this scenario, any well-defined part of any
finished
cultural object can automatically become a building block for new objects in
the same
medium.  Parts can even =8Cpublish=B9 themselves and other cultural objects
can
"subscribe" to them the way you subscribe now to RSS feeds or podcasts.

When we think of modularity today, we assume that a number of objects that
can be created
in a modular system is limited. Indeed, if we are building these objects
from a very
small set of blocks, there are a limited number of ways in which these
blocks can go
together. (Although as the relative physical size of the blocks in relation
to the
finished object get smaller, the number of different objects which can be
built
increases: think IKEA modular bookcase versus a Lego set.) However, in my
scenario
modularity does not involve any reduction in the number of forms that can be
created.
On the contrary, if the blocks themselves are created using one of many
already
developed computer designed methods (such as parametric design), every time
they are used
again they can modify themselves automatically to assure that they look
different. In
other words, if pre-computer modularity leads to repetition and reduction,
post-computer
modularity can produce unlimited diversity.

I think that such "real-time" or "on-demand" modularity can only be imagined
today after online stores such as Amazon, blog indexing services such as
Technorati, and
architectural projects such as Yokohama International Port Terminal by
Foreign Office
Architects and Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles by Frank Gehry
visibly
demonstrated that we can develop hardware and software to coordinate massive
numbers of
cultural objects and their building blocks: books, bog entries, construction
parts. But
whether we will ever have such a cultural ecology is not important. We often
look at
the present by placing it within long historical trajectories.  But I
believe that we can
also productively use a different, complementary method. We can imagine what
will happen
if the contemporary techno-cultural conditions which are already firmly
established are
pushed to their logical limit. In other words, rather than placing the
present in the
context of the past, we can look at it in the context of a logically
possible future.
This "look from the future" approach may illuminate the present in a way not
possible
if we only "look from the past." The sketch of logically possible cultural
ecology I
just made is a little experiment in this method: futurology or science
fiction as a
method of contemporary cultural analysis.

So what else can we see today if we will look at it from this logically
possible future
of complete remixability and universal modularity? If my scenario sketched
above looks
like a "cultural science fiction," consider the process that is already
happening on
the one end of remixability continuum. Although strictly speaking it does
not involve
increasing modularity to help remixability, ultimately its logic is the
same: helping
cultural bits move around more easily. I am talking about a move in Internet
culture
today from intricately packaged and highly designed "information objects"
which are
hard to take apart -- such as web sites made in Flash -- to "strait"
information:
ASCII text files, feeds of RSS feeds, blog entries, SMS messages. As Richard
MacManus and
Joshua Porter put it, "Enter Web 2.0, a vision of the Web in which
information is
broken up into "microcontent" units that can be distributed over dozens of
domains. 
The Web of documents has morphed into a Web of data. We are no longer just
looking to the
same old sources for information. Now we=B9re looking to a new set of tools
to aggregate
and remix microcontent in new and useful ways."[3] And it is much easier to
"aggregate and remix microcontent" if it is not locked by a design. Strait
ASCII
file, a JPEG, a map, a sound or video file can move around the Web and enter
into
user-defined remixes such as a set of RSS feeds; cultural objects where the
parts are
locked together (such as Flash interface) cant. In short, in the era of Web
2.0,
"information wants to be ASCII."[4]

If we approach the present from the perspective of a potential future of
"ultimate
modularity / remixability," we can see other incremental steps towards this
future
which are already occurring. For instance, Orange <orange.blender.org> (an
animation
studio n Amsterdam) has setup a team of artists and developers around the
world to
collaborate on an animated short film; the studio plans to release all of
their
production files, 3D models, textures, and animation as Creative Commons
open content on
a extended edition DVD.

Creative Commons offers a special set of Sampling Licenses which "let
artists and
authors invite other people to use a part of their work and make it new."[5]
Flickr
offers multiple tools to combine multiple photos (not broken into parts --
at least so
far) together: tags, sets, groups, Organizr. Flickr interface thus position
each photo
within multiple "mixes." Flickr also offers "notes" which allows the users
to
assign short notes to individual parts of a photograph. To add a note to a
photo posted
on Flickr, you draw a rectangle on any part of the phone and then attach
some text to
it. A number of notes can be attached to the same photo. I read this feature
as another
a sign of modularity/remixability mentality, as it encourages users to
mentally break a
photo into separate parts. In other words, "notes" break a single media
object --
a photograph -- into blocks.

In a similar fashion, the common interface of DVDs breaks a film into
chapters. Media
players such as iPod and online media stores such as iTunes break music CDs
into separate
tracks -- making a track into a new basic unit of musical culture. In all
these
examples, what was previously a single coherent cultural object is broken
into separate
blocks that can be accessed individually. In other words, if "information
wants to be
ASCII," "contents wants to be granular." And culture as a whole? Culture has
always
been about remixability -- but now this remixability s available to all
participants
of Internet culture.

Since the introduction of first Kodak camera, "users" had tools to create
massive
amounts of vernacular media. Later they were given amateur film cameras,
tape recorders,
video recorders...But the fact that people had access to "tools of media
production" for
as long as the professional media creators until recently did not seem to
play a big
role: the amateur=B9 and professional=B9 media pools did not mix.
Professional
photographs traveled between photographer=B9s darkroom and newspaper editor;
private
pictures of a wedding traveled between members of the family. But the
emergence of
multiple and interlinked paths which encourage media objects to easily
travel between web
sites, recording and display devices, hard drives, and people changes
things.
Remixability becomes practically a built-in feature of digital networked
media universe.
In a nutshell, what maybe more important than the introduction of a video
iPod, a
consumer HD camera, Flickr, or yet another exiting new device or service is
how easy it
is for media objects to travel between all these devices and services -
which now all
become just temporary stations in media=B9s Brownian motion.



October 2005


NOTES

[1] Approaching a definition of Web 2.0," The Social Software Weblog
<socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com>, accessed October 28, 2005.

[2] Ulf Poschardt, DJ Culture, trans. Shaun Whiteside (London: Quartet Books
Ltd,
1998), 123.

[3] "Web 2.0 Design: Bootstrapping the Social Web," Digital Web Magazine <
http://www.digital-web.com/types/web_2_design/>, accessed October 28, 2005.

[4] Modern information environment is characterized by a constant tension
between the
desires to "package" information (Flash design for instance) an= d strip it
from all
packaging so it can travel easier between different media and sites.

[5] http://creativecommons.org/about/sampling, accessed October 31, 2005.



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